Since mainstream left-liberal media do not seriously ask this
question, the analysis of what has gone wrong and where we are
heading has been mostly off-base. Investigation of the kinds of
under-handed, criminal tactics fascist regimes undertake to
legitimize their agenda and accelerate the rate of change in their
favor is dismissed as indulging in "conspiracy theory." Liberals
insist that this regime must be treated under the rules of
"politics as usual." Liberals are quick to note certain obvious
dissimilarities with previous variants of fascism and say that what
is happening in America is not fascist. It took German justice
minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin to make the comparison explicit
(under present American rules of political discourse, she has been
duly sacked from her cabinet post); but at the liberal New
York Times or The Nation, American writers dare
not speak the truth.
The blinkered assertion that we are immune to the virus ignores
degrees of convergence and distinction based on the individual
patient's history. The Times and other liberal voices have been
obsessed over the last year with the rise of minority fascist
parties in the Netherlands, France, and other European countries.
They have questioned the tastefulness of new books and movies about
Hitler, and again demonized such icons of Nazism as Leni
Riefenstahl. Is this perhaps a displacement of American anxiety
onto the safer European scene, liberal intellectuals here not
wanting to confront the troubling truth? The pace of events in the
last year has been almost as blindingly fast as it was after
Hitler's Machtergreifung and the consolidation of fascist power in
1933. Speed stuns and silences.
Max Frankel, former editor of the Times, quotes from biographer
Joachim Fest in his review of Speer: The Final Verdict: " . . .how
easily, given appropriate conditions, people will allow themselves
to be mobilized into violence, abandoning the humanitarian
traditions they have built up over centuries to protect themselves
from each other," and that a "primal being" such as Hitler "will
always crop up again." Is Frankel really redirecting his anxiety
about the primal being that has arisen in America? When Frankel
says that "Speer far more than Hitler [because the former came from
a culturally refined background] makes us realize how fragile these
precautions are, and how the ground on which we all stand is always
threatened," is this an oblique reference to the ground shifting
from under us?
The Iraqi adventure, which is only the first step in a more
ambitious militarist agenda, has been opposed by the most
conservative warmongers of past administrations. If the test of any
theory is its predictive capacity, Bush's extreme risk-taking is
better explained by the fascist model. Purely economic motives are
a large part of the story, but there is a deeper derivation that
exceeds such mundane rationales. Several of the apparent
contradictions in Bush's governance make perfect sense if the
fascist prism is applied, but not with the normal perspective.
To pose the question doesn't mean that this is a completed
project; at any point, anything can happen to shift the course of
history in a different direction. Yet after repeated and open
corruption of the normal electoral process, several declarations of
world war (including in three major addresses, and now the National
Security Strategy document), adventurous and unprecedented military
doctrines, suspension of much of the Bill of Rights, and clear
signals that a declaration of emergency to crush remaining dissent
is on the way, surely it is time to analyze the situation
differently.
Absent that perspicacity, false diagnoses and prescriptions will
continue. It is fine to be concerned about tyrannous Muslim
regimes, and surely they need to set their own house in order, but
not now, not in this context, and not under the auspices of the
American fascist regime. Liberals don't yet realize, or fail to
admit, that they may have been condemned to irrelevance for quite
some time; the death blow against even mild welfare statism might
already have been struck.
The similarities between American fascism and particularly the
National Socialist precedent, both historical and theoretical, are
remarkable. Fascism is home, it is here to stay, and it better be
countered with all the intellectual resources at our disposal.
American fascism is tapping into the perennial complaint against
liberalism: that it doesn't provide an authentic sense of belonging
to the majority of people. And that is a criticism difficult to
dismiss out of hand. As the language of liberalism has become flat
and predictable, some Americans have become more ready to accept an
alternative, no matter how ridiculous, as long as it sounds
vigorous and muscular.
America today is seeking a return to some form of vitalism, some
organic, volkisch order that will "unite" the blue and red states
in an eternal Volkgemeinschaft; is in a state of perpetual war and
militaristic aggression targeting all potential counters to
hegemony; has been coercing and blackmailing its own victims and
oppressed (justified by anti-political correctness rhetoric) to
return to a mythical national consensus; has introduced
surveillance technology to demolish the private sphere to an extent
unimaginable in the recent past; and fetishizes technology as the
futuristic solution to age-old ills of alienation and mistrust.
And we are right in the mainstream of the Western philosophical
and political tradition in this subtle (overnight?) transformation.
Liberal democracy was replaced by Mussolini by these two Holy
Trinities: Believe, Obey, Fight, and Order, Authority, Justice.
These slogans seem to replace every liberal system sooner or later.
Italian propagandistic slogans included: War is to man as
childbirth is to woman, and Better to live one day as a lion than a
hundred years as a sheep. Sooner or later, the mob is persuaded
that fascism best addresses its unfulfilled spiritual and
psychological needs. Sooner or later there is a Hitler, and even if
there isn't a leader as charismatic as him, there is an
anti-modernity counter-revolution.
The enlightenment everywhere has contained the seeds of its own
destruction. Fascism merely borrows from the enlightenment's credo
that violence may sometimes be necessary to achieve valid political
ends, and that human reason alone can lead humanity to utopia. Is
Nazism an absolute aberration? Is America totally immune to
fascism? Then we might as well discredit Rousseau's "general will,"
Hegel's historical spirit, Goethe and Schelling's romanticization
of nature and genius, Darwin's natural selection, and Nietzsche's
superman. When all is said and done, a Kant or Mill is never a
match for a Nietzsche or Sorel. Industrial malaise (now
post-industrial disorder), evaded by the dead-ends and delusions of
liberalism, leads only to a romantic revolution, which is fine as
long as it is in the hands of Byron, Keats, Carlyle, Ruskin and
Arnold, but becomes eventually converted to a propaganda-saturated
Third Way. Since liberalism doesn't take up the challenge, fascism
steps in to say that it offers an answer to centrifugal difference
and lack of common purpose, and that it will dare to link
industrial prosperity with communal goals.
How great a deviation from the roots of the enlightenment, the
foundations of its self-justification, is the Manichean
demonization of enemies, aliens, impure races, and barbaric others?
America today wants to be communal and virile; it seeks to overcome
what is presented by propagandists as the unreasonable demands for
affirmative action and reparations by minorities and women; it
wants to revalorize nation and region and race to take control of
the future; it seeks to remold the nation through propaganda and
charismatic leadership, into overcoming the social divisiveness of
capitalism and democracy.
We have our own nationalist myths that our brand of fascism taps
right into. In that sense, America is not exceptional. In the near
future, America can be expected to embark on a more radical search
to define who is not part of the natural order: exclusion,
deportation, and eventually extermination, might again become the
order of things. Of course, we can notice obvious differences from
the German nationalist tradition: but that is precisely the task of
scholars to delineate, rather than pretend that fascism occurred
only in Italy and Germany and satellite states in the first half of
the century, and occurs today only in Europe in minor movements
that have no chance of gaining political supremacy.
It is wrong to pretend that fascism takes hold only in the midst
of extreme economic depression or political chaos. (A perception of
crisis or instability is indispensable to realizing fascism,
however.) Fascism can emerge when things are not all that bad
economically, politically, and culturally. The surprise about
Weimar Germany is how well the political system was at times
working, with proportional representation (almost an ideal of
strong democracy theorists) providing political expression for a
full range of ideologies. Germany was economically strong, an
industrial powerhouse, despite having had to overcome massive
disabilities imposed by the Versailles Treaty. In the early
thirties, Hitler's rise was facilitated by massive unemployment
(perhaps forty percent of Germans were unemployed), but this was a
phenomenon throughout the Western world.
The key point to note is that at many junctures along the way,
it was possible that Hitler's rise might never have happened. And
that the elites accepted Hitler as the best possible option. All
this makes Hitler and Nazism unexceptional. The basic paradigm
remains more or less intact: we only have to account for variations
in the American model. Capitalism today is different, so are the
postmodern means of propaganda, and so are the technological tools
of suppression. Besides, American foundational myths vary from
European ones, and the romanticism propounded by Goethe, Schelling,
Wagner and Nietzsche contrasts with a different kind of holistic
urge in America. But that is only a matter of variation, not direct
opposition. Liberals who say that demographics work against a
Republican majority in the early twenty-first century do have a
point; but fascism can occur precisely at that moment of truth,
when the course of political history can definitely tend to one
direction or another. A mere push can set things on a whole
different course, regardless of underlying cultural or demographic
trends. Nazism never had the support of the majority of Germans; at
best about a third fully supported it. About a third of Americans
today are certifiably fascist; another twenty percent or so can be
swayed around with smart propaganda to particular causes. So the
existence of liberal institutions is not necessarily inconsistent
with fascism's political dominance.
With all of Germany's cultural strength, brutality won out; the
same analysis can apply to America. Hitler never won clear
majorities; yet once he was in power, he crushed all dissent.
Consider the parallels to the fateful election of 2000. Hitler's
ascent to power was facilitated by the political elites; again,
note the similarities to the last two years. Hitler took advantage
of the Reichstag fire to totally change the shape of German
institutions and culture; think of 9/11 as a close parallel. Hitler
was careful to give the impression of always operating under legal
cover, even for the most massive offenses against humanity; note
again the similarity of a pseudo-legal shield for the actions of
the American fascists. One can go on and on in this vein.
If we look at Stanley Payne's classical general theory of
fascism, we are struck by the increasing similarities with the
American model:
A. The Fascist Negations
- Anti-liberalism
- Anti-communism
- Anti-conservatism (though with the understanding that fascist
groups . . .[are] more willing to undertake temporary alliances
with groups from any other sector, most commonly the right).
B. Ideology and Goals
- Creation of a new nationalist authoritarian state.
- Organization of some new kind of regulated, multi-class,
integrated national economic structure.
- The goal of empire.
- Specific espousal of an idealist, voluntarist creed.
C. Style and Organization
- Emphasis on aesthetic structure . . .stressing romantic and
mystical aspects.
- Attempted mass mobilization with militarization of political
relationships and style and the goal of a mass party militia.
- Positive evaluation and use of . . .violence.
- Extreme stress on the masculine principle.
- Exaltation of youth.
- Specific tendency toward an authoritarian, charismatic,
personal style of command.
American fascism denies affiliation with liberalism, communism,
and conservatism. The first two denials are obvious; the third
requires a little analysis, but fascism is not conservatism and it
takes issue with conservatism's anti-revolutionary stance.
Conservatism's libertarian strand, an American staple (think of the
recent protestations of Dick Armey, the departing Bob Barr, and the
Cato Institute against some of the grossest violations of civil
liberties), would not agree with fascism's "nationalist
authoritarian state." Reaganite anti-government rhetoric might well
have been a precursor to fascism, but Hayekian free market and
deregulationist ideology cannot be labeled fascism.
Continuing to look at Payne's list, we note that the goal of
"empire," that much proscribed word in official American
vocabulary, has found open acceptance over the last year among the
fascist vanguard. Voluntarism has been elevated to iconic status in
the current American manifestation of fascism. It takes a bit more
effort to notice American fascism's "emphasis on aesthetic
structure. . .stressing romantic and mystical aspects," but
reflection suggests many innovative stylistic emphases. The mass
party militia, especially large bands of organized, militarized
youth, seems to be missing for now. Violence is glorified for
its own sake. The masculine principle has been elevated as the
basis of policy-making. Command is authoritarian, charismatic, and
personal. It is true that a charismatic leader like Hitler is
missing from the scene; but one would have to ask if this is not a
redundancy in the American historical context. Perhaps we are a
society mobilized by very small degrees of charisma, unlike more
informed, impassioned, ideologically committed electorates.
Roger Griffin holds that fascism consists of a series of myths:
fascism is anti-liberal, anti-conservative, anti-rational,
charismatic, socialist, totalitarian, racist and eclectic. If one
wishes to argue that American fascism is by no means socialist, one
ought to take a deeper look at National Socialism's conception of
socialism. In a sense, America is a socialist society, to the
extent that the government is the main driving force behind
technology, innovation, and science: the
military-industrial-academic complex. National Socialism was
comforting to the right-wing capitalists because they believed that
socialism was a convenient fiction for the ideology. Nevertheless,
fascism's vitalism and holism militate against any facile
interpretations of what socialism means. Fascism is eclectic and
ready to abandon economic principle for what it perceives as the
greater good of the nation. As Sternhell has described it for
Germany, fascism in the American synthesis is a cultural rebellion,
a revolutionary ideology; totalitarianism is of its very essence.
There are more similarities than immediately apparent between
Marxism as it was put into practice by the twentieth century
communist states, and "socialist" ideology put into practice by the
various fascist states.
Ian Kershaw has evaluated the similarities between Italian and
German fascism:
- Extreme chauvinistic nationalism with pronounced imperialistic
expansionist tendencies;
- an anti-socialist, anti-Marxist thrust aimed at the destruction
of working class organizations and their Marxist political
philosophy;
- the basis in a mass party drawing from all sectors of society,
though with pronounced support in the middle class and proving
attractive to the peasantry and to various uprooted or highly
unstable sectors of the population;
- fixation on a charismatic, plebiscitary, legitimized
leader;
- extreme intolerance towards all oppositional and presumed
oppositional groups, expressed through vicious terror, open
violence and ruthless repression;
- glorification of militarism and war, heightened by the backlash
to the comprehensive socio-political crisis in Europe arising from
the First World War;
- dependence upon an "alliance" with existing elites, industrial,
agrarian, military and bureaucratic, for their political
breakthrough;
- and, at least an initial function, despite a
populist-revolutionary anti-establishment rhetoric, in the
stabilization or restoration of social order and capitalist
structures.
Viewed in this perspective, in only the last few months America
has advanced tremendously from emerging to realized fascism. Its
imperialist and expansionist tendencies need to be couched less and
less in Wilsonian idealist terms for mass acceptance. Unions can
still be considered an oppositional, populist force, but working
class cohesion has nearly been destroyed. Still, it needs to be
said that instead of fascism appealing across class and
geographical lines, the country remains divided between the liberal
(urban, coastal) and proto-fascist (rural, Southern) factions.
Also, the plebiscitary leader has not yet fully emerged.
Oppositional groups are often self-silencing, but the most of the
ruling establishment continues to practice a mild form of
liberalism, and hopes that if things get too out of hand it can
mobilize public opinion against brutal suppression. Although not
all elites have yet been co-opted, think of Dershowitz's advocacy
of torture and Larry Summers's patriotic swing. There is general
agreement on militaristic aims. The attempted stabilization of the
social order in the form of the culture wars fought in the previous
decade is one of the less appreciated manifestations of emerging
fascism.
George Mosse describes fascism as viewing itself in a permanent
state of war, to mobilize masculine virile energy, enlisting the
masses as "foot soldiers of a civic religion." As Mosse points out,
fascism seeks a higher form of democracy even as it rejects the
customary forms of representative government. Propaganda is
pervasive in America; we only need to delineate its descent from
the Nazi form. Mosse rejects the notion that fascism ruled through
terror; "it was built upon a popular consensus." Fascism is a
higher consensus seeking to bring about the "new man" rooted in
Christian doctrine. Can there be a better description of the
nineties American culture wars instigated by the proto-fascists
than the following?:
When fascists spoke of culture, they meant a proper attitude
toward life: encompassing the ability to accept a faith, the work
ethic, and discipline, but also receptivity to art and the
appreciation of the native landscape. The true community was
symbolized by factors opposed to materialism, by art and
literature, the symbols of the past and the stereotypes of the
present. The National Socialist emphasis upon myth, symbol,
literature and art is indeed common to all fascism.
Most of this is obvious, except the reference to literature and
art; but think of the fetishization of the Great Books and the
mythical classical curriculum by Bennett and his like. In thus
viewing fascism above all as a cultural movement, the objection
might be raised that American fascism lacks a distinctive stylistic
expression that iconizes youth and war. Instead, it might be argued
that it suffers from callow endorsement by dour old white males,
whose cultural appeal is limited in the discredited stylistic forms
they employ. To some extent this is true, but one must never
underestimate the fertile ground American anti-intellectualism
provides for more banal forms of propaganda and cultural terrorism
than needed to be deployed by Nazism. (Eminem does electrocute
Cheney in his video, but in real life Cheney rules.) American
communication technology, as was true of Nazi Germany, has
pioneered whole new methods of trivialization of "mass death" and
elevation of brutality as a "great experience."
War is both necessary and great, and that is America's
continuation of the fascist fascination with revitalization of
"basic moral values." Furthermore, the puritanism of American
fascism does not necessarily conflict with the Nazi emphasis on
style and beauty: Nazism annexed "the pillars of respectability:
hard work, self-discipline, and good manners," which explains "the
puritanism of National Socialism, its emphasis upon chastity, the
family, good manners, and the banishment of women from public
life." The analogs to Karl May's widely circulated novels in Weimar
and Nazi Germany can probably be found here, as can America's
answer to Max Nordau, rebelling against decadence in art and
literature, and maintaining that "lack of clarity, inability to
uphold moral standards, and absence of self-discipline all sprang
from the degeneration of their [artists'] physical organism." Think
only of the demonization of Mapplethorpe and others, the
emasculation of the NEA, and the continued attack on alleged
artistic degeneracy. We must be willing to consider expanded
definitions of how romanticism has been incorporated by American
fascism.
Liberals might complain that in America there hasn't been a
declared revolution, a transformation that asserts itself as such.
But as noted above fascism simply takes over the liberals' language
of "clarity, decency, and natural laws," as well as its ideals of
"tolerance and freedom." That sounds like the sleight-of-hand
performed by the fascists here. As Mosse says:
Tolerance. . .was claimed by fascists in antithesis to their
supposedly intolerant enemies, while freedom was placed within the
community. To be tolerant meant not tolerating those who opposed
fascism: individual liberty was possible only within the
collectivity. Here once more, concepts that had become part and
parcel of established patterns of thought were not rejected (as so
many historians have claimed) but instead co-opted - fascism would
bring about ideals with which people were comfortable, but only on
its own terms.
So to be liberal means to be intolerant, out of sync with the
American democratic spirit. That suggestion has taken hold among
large numbers of people.
The current American aesthetic appreciation of technology
("smart" bombs) is also of a piece with Hitler's passion. Fascism
is not a deviance from popular cultural trends, but only the taming
of activism within revived nationalist myths. Mosse holds that
fascism didn't diverge from mainstream European culture; it
absorbed most of what held great mass appeal. It never decried
workers' tastelessness; it accepted these realities. The same
principles apply to American fascism.
Umberto Eco, in his essay "Ur-Fascism," identifies fourteen
characteristics of "eternal fascism": not all of them have to be
present at the same time for a system to be considered fascist, and
some of them may even be contradictory: "There was only one Nazism,
and we cannot describe the ultra-Catholic Falangism of Franco as
Nazism, given that Nazism is fundamentally pagan, polytheistic, and
anti-Christian, otherwise it is not Nazism." Eco is intelligent
enough to suggest a family of resemblance, overlap, and kinship,
and the analyst's task is to note which particular characteristics
apply to a system, and understand the reasons for the absence of
others, rather than dismiss the fascist categorization if a single
feature from a previous fascist variant doesn't apply: "Remove the
imperialist dimension from Fascism, and you get Franco or Salazar;
remove the colonialist dimension, and you get Balkan Fascism. Add
to Italian Fascism a dash of radical anti-Capitalism (which never
appealed to Mussolini), and you get Ezra Pound. Add the cult of
Celtic mythology and the mysticism of the Grail (completely
extraneous to official Fascism), and you get one of the most
respected gurus of Fascism, Julius Evola." It is noteworthy about
Eco's matrix that all fourteen of his characteristics of ur-fascism
apply to America to some degree: 1. "the cult of tradition" (which
may be "syncretic" and able to "tolerate contradictions"); 2. "the
rejection of modernism" and "irrationalism"; 3. "the cult of action
for action's sake"; 4. "dissent is betrayal"; 5. "fear of
difference," or racism; 6. "the appeal to the frustrated middle
classes" [this seems to cause the most trouble to American
liberals; Eco clarifies, "In our day, in which the old
'proletarians' are becoming petits bourgeois (and the lumpen
proletariat has excluded itself from the political arena), Fascism
will find its audience in this new majority.]; 7. "obsession with
conspiracies," along with xenophobia and nationalism; 8. "the enemy
is at once too strong and too weak" [note the simultaneous
characterization of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and no doubt
future Islamic "terrorists" as capable of irrevocably harming us
and being impotent to really do so]; 9. 'Pacifism is. . .collusion
with the enemy," "life is a permanent war," and only a "final
solution" can herald an age of peace; 10. "scorn for the weak"
imposed by a mass elite; 11. "the cult of death" [American fascists
ascribe this characteristic to terrorists, when in fact it is one
of their own supreme defining characteristics]; 12. transferring of
the "will to power onto sexual questions," or "machismo"; 13.
"individuals have no rights," and fascism "has to oppose 'rotten'
parliamentary governments"; and 14. "Ur-Fascism uses newspeak."
No doubt, fascism is a descriptor too carelessly thrown around;
but Nixon and Reagan, no matter how reprehensible their politics,
were not quite fascist. Bush is the most dangerous man in
contemporary history: Hitler didn't have access to weapons that
could blow up the world, and no American or other leader since
World War II with access to such weapons has been as out of
control. Perhaps a non-controversial statement may be that the
fascist tendency always exists, at the very least latent and
dormant. But when more and more of the latency becomes actualized,
there comes a point when the nature of the problem has to be
redefined. We may already have crossed that point. As Eco notes,
"Ur-Fascism can still return in the most innocent of guises. Our
duty is to unmask it and to point the finger at each of its new
forms every day, in every part of the world." And as Eco
reminds us, Roosevelt issued a similar warning.
Since liberals don't understand the magnitude of the crisis
global capitalism faces, they don't understand the extent of the
desperate, last-ditch effort to find an ideological glue ("terror")
to hold together the centrifugal forces in the American population.
Part of the confusion is that this is fascism but not really
fascism it is only its simulation, although no less
horrifying for that reason because all the twentieth-century
ideologies (liberalism, conservatism, and socialism) are rapidly
dissolving.
Anis Shivani studied economics at Harvard, and is the author of
two novels, The Age of Critics and Memoirs of a Terrorist. He
welcomes comments at: Anis_Shivani_ab92@post.harvard.edu